My name is Saul!I'm an award winning Word of Mouth Marketer, Professional Speaker on the subjects of Social Media, Customer Service and best of all... Word of Mouth.I collect Air Force One sneakers and think you should hire me... (as a consultant) to teach you how to get your company doing interesting things!

Photos from the Drupal Conference in San Francisco, CA 2010

Forget engagement for a minute, would you fight along side your customers?

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At last count there are exactly 763418 ways to attract customers and build brand loyalty. I’m not going to list them all but I am going to focus (for this post at least) on one of my favorite ways.

Advocacy Marketing.

Advocacy Marketing is basically picking a cause that directly affects your industry or customers and fighting on their behalf…and just so we are clear, this is not picking a charity and donating to them (that is a good thing as well) but rather picking an issue that people that rally around and if you win the fight you will have made your small part of the world a better place.

There are a lot of great examples of this but my favorite right now Is the fight against spec work being led by Upstack. You see they are a service that matches people looking for creative work with amazingly creative people. Their business relies on having a full roster of happy designers to fulfill their brand promise so this makes sense to fight on behalf of the designers who work with them but more then that (and this is the impressive part) they made their advocacy stand one of the differentiators in their business while a majority of their competitors have based their model on the spec work/contest model.Wes Wilson, the guy behind Upstack is a friend and I am helping with some of the idea generation for this (that’s how I know so much about it) because he and I share the same passion for this cause.

The interesting thing about advocacy marketing is that it doesn’t apply to every business or situation but if it did and you had the choice between marketing to your customers or starting a movement (maybe revolution is a better word) what would you choose?